Disgrace | Context

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Historical Context
Disgrace offers a particular point of view that is historically and literarily distinct. Because the novel
wrestles deeply with questions of history and justice, a basic familiarity with South African history
will open up the story for readers. It is set shortly after the end of apartheid, the period of legally
enforced segregation that endured in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Most of the novel's action
takes place in the South African city of Cape Town and in the rural Eastern Cape near Grahamstown.

Early Colonialism in South Africa

Racial diversity, conflict, oppression, and stratification have been features of South African society
since the first days of European colonialism in the early 17th century. Because of its strategic
location along the sea route from Europe to Asia, the lands of the Cape's indigenous population were
occupied by settlers and merchants from the Netherlands and other European countries as well as
by slaves from other parts of Africa and Asia.

Colonialism and the Eastern Cape

The character Lucy Lurie's homestead is set in the Eastern Cape region, where colonization began in
the late 18th century. The native Xhosa-speaking tribes and the foreign settlers, including the early
Dutch settlers known as Afrikaners and the later British settlers, engaged in numerous wars for
control of land. The Xhosa lost their lands and their political autonomy but maintained much of their
culture through adaptation. The Afrikaners and the British did not intermix and maintained distinct
cultures and languages. Both groups also sought to exploit the labor of black Africans while
maintaining social separation from them.
The Afrikaners created republics (also called states), called the Boer Republics, as a form of self-
governed regions. Britain also began establishing provinces in the region. Although the Xhosa lost
land and political autonomy to the colonists, they adapted to the changes by incorporating the new
ways into their traditional culture. In the mid-19th century, the British colonial government began
programs designed to "civilize" the Xhosas. This included employing Xhosas, many of whom lived as
tenants on lands taken from them, as wage laborers.

Diamonds and Development

In 1870 large deposits of diamonds were discovered in South Africa. The development of rigidly
segregated industrial and social systems followed. Black Africans endured deadly conditions in the
mines for the profits of European-owned companies.

South African Colonialism in the Early 20th Century

At the turn of the 20th century, the British gained complete control of South Africa when they ousted
the last Afrikaner governments. The parliamentary governments Britain created in the first decade
of the 20th century excluded black Africans from political participation. In 1910 the various
republics were united into a single Union of South Africa under British control.

Most black Africans had lost their land. A remaining minority lived in extreme poverty as farmers on
communal reserves allotted by the government. White foreign missionaries succeeded in converting
a majority of black Africans to Christianity. These missionaries also ran schools that provided the
only opportunity for blacks to receive a decent education. Graduates of the missionary schools
formed a black middle class of professionals, which banded together to form the African National
Congress in 1912. The organization worked to counter white dominance and promote the interests
of the subordinated races.

The Apartheid Era

The British retained control of South Africa until 1948, when the Afrikaner National Party came into
power. However, although already established as the ruling party, the National Party did not
officially declare South Africa an independent republic until 1961. The new government's ideology
was of white supremacy, and it strictly controlled every aspect of society. A policy of apartheid
("apartness"), or legally enforced racial separation, was immediately put into place. Four principles
guided the various laws that comprised apartheid:

• South Africans were classified into one of four races: white, colored, African, and Indian.
• Only whites could have political power.
• The government worked only for the white race's interests.
• The population was divided into "nations." The largest was the white nation, which
included speakers of both Afrikaans and English. The other races were divided into as
many as 10 nations.
In the following decades, as white South Africans experienced rising economic prosperity, black
South Africans experienced a steady erosion of their rights and opportunities at the hand of the
government. By 1950 laws were passed making it illegal for members of different races to have
sexual relations or marry. In light of such legislation, the interracial sexual acts in Disgrace take on
additional meaning.

The End of Apartheid

The erosion of apartheid began in the 1980s. With the Constitution of 1984, nonwhites began to be
explicitly included in the political process. Throughout the latter part of the 1980s, the systematic
oppression of apartheid lessened as some apartheid laws were repealed and authorities ceased
enforcing certain others. In a decade characterized by domestic conflict and racial violence, other
nations began pressuring South Africa to reform apartheid.

In 1994 a new constitution that did not racialize the political process came into effect. As well,
Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), a black member of the African nationalist movement who had been
imprisoned for his antiapartheid activism, replaced an Afrikaner white supremacist and became the
country's president. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, meant to foster healing and
create national unity, began the following year. (The TRC was a committee that investigated violent
crimes and human rights abuses committed during apartheid.) At that point South Africa had the
legal framework in place to begin anew. However, as Disgrace shows, the pervasive racial
stratification, inequality, and crime that characterized the era of apartheid remained.

Literary Context
Disgrace may be classified as postmodern, postcolonial, postapartheid literature by a white author.
This complex classification speaks to the novel's techniques, subject matter, and perspective. It's also
worth noting that before Disgrace, Coetzee's work was largely allegorical, and this novel represents
his first full-fledged attempt at realism. Nevertheless, there is still a symbol system in the novel that
has been interpreted as an allegory for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which was a
committee established to investigate human rights violations and violent crimes committed during
apartheid.
Postmodernism and Disgrace
Postmodernism embraces multiple disciplines, including literature. According to some philosophers,
this period is characterized by a disconnection from the real. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard
(1929–2007) claims that in postmodernity we encounter the real, external world only after it has
been filtered through our virtual or mental conceptions. This primacy of internal interpretation over
external reality can be seen in Disgrace, where the protagonist's understanding of experience is
filtered through the romantic archetypes and literary concepts that he values above all else. This
makes him susceptible to delusion, immoral behavior, and arrogance.
Postmodern literature employs a variety of strategies, including "intertextuality," the belief that a
work of literature derives meaning in two ways. Meaning is constructed from the relationship words
have to each other within the work. Additionally, meaning is constructed through the relationship of
the text to other literary works. Disgrace is a strongly intertextual novel. For example, it engages
significantly with the works of Romantic poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and George
Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). An understanding of these authors' works clarifies the meaning
and significance of the novel's plot, characterization, and themes.

Postcolonial Fiction by a White Author

Postcolonial fiction examines colonialism's continuing effects on a society after the end of formal
colonial rule. The genre takes for granted that colonialism's effects continue to direct and shape
individuals and society.

Postcolonial authors are usually concerned with putting forth the long-suppressed point of view of
the people who bore the oppression of colonialism. Disgrace is distinct in this respect. J.M.
Coetzee is white and, therefore, of the race of the colonizers rather than the colonized. The
protagonist and the most developed characters in Disgrace are also white. The novel examines from
a white perspective the shifts in the postcolonial (and postapartheid) social order where white
dominance is no longer an assumption. Coetzee depicts his white characters, such as David Lurie,
Lucy Lurie, and Bev Shaw, as they adjust to this shift. The novel reflects the struggle of postcolonial
whites to accept a new social position that may be characterized by being indebted, useless, or even
dependent on others.

Apartheid and Postapartheid Literature

Apartheid had specific effects on the literary culture of South Africa. Censorship was rampant.
Authors were encouraged to produce works of social realism, a form of realistic literature embedded
with a pronational message.

South African literature produced after apartheid's end in 1994 has certain characteristic features as
authors reacted to the changes in their culture. The genre tends to examine the position of women
and race in postapartheid South Africa. As well, much of the literature focuses on themes of conflict,
romance, the perspective of whites, and the relationship between truth, justice, confession, and
reconciliation.

Disgrace is heavily concerned with all these issues. Lucy's rape, her silencing of it, and her choice to
ally with Petrus and turn her land over to him are all results of the upheaval and changing social
order that followed apartheid's end. Lucy is aware she is at a moment in history that demands she be
humbled and pay back what her race has taken. She accepts this new situation with dignity. On the
other hand, her father, of an older generation, cannot understand what is happening and clings to his
old ideas of justice.
Wordsworth and Byron in Disgrace
A significant part of the intertextuality in Disgrace is the text's dialogue with the works, ideas, and
lives of two English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. The central character,
David Lurie, considers himself a disciple of Wordsworth. He takes Wordsworth's philosophy of
poetry to heart, adopting it as his framework for living. Wordsworth expressed his beliefs in
his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), an essay preceding a collection he wrote jointly with poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the Preface Wordsworth stated that poetry should take the raw
materials of everyday life and elevate them by throwing "over them a certain coloring of the
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way ... and
make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them ... the primary laws of our nature."
Throughout his writing career, Wordsworth evoked the concept of grace in his poetry.
Wordsworthian grace is a state of blessedness that is moral as well as artistic. In contrast, David
Lurie's state of disgrace is seen in sharp relief against the grace so valued by the character's hero.
The second major literary presence in the novel is that of George Gordon, Lord Byron, a
contemporary and foil to Wordsworth. David Lurie's character has much in common with the
character of Byron as rendered by history. As the novel notes, Byron's personality is conflated with
his literary works. Byron placed high value on passion, particularly sexual passion, a value that
David shares. In his day, Byron was something of a celebrity, though he was more notorious than
honorable. His escape to Greece, like David's exile to the countryside, was a result of his disgrace
following a scandal. While Wordsworthian grace is David Lurie's ideal, Byronic scandal and disgrace
is his reality. When Lucy Lurie teasingly calls David "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," she is
quoting the words used by Byron's lover Caroline Lamb to describe the poet.

Both of Lurie's poetic heroes wrote epics that broke with tradition by placing themselves as the
hero rather than using a historical or mythical protagonist. David Lurie sees himself as a
misunderstood hero in his own personal epic, out of step with his time because of his noble
efforts to resurrect an intellectual, artistic, and passionate way of being. The reader, however,
might be encouraged by Coetzee to read Lurie as Byron's Lucifer character, as suggested by the
lecture Lurie gives on Byron's poem Lara in chapter 4.
Disgrace | Characters
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Character Description

Protagonist David Lurie is a middle-aged professor who becomes disgraced after the stu
David Lurie
he is sleeping, Melanie Isaacs, files a complaint against him. Read More

Lucy Lurie is David Lurie's grown daughter who runs a dog kenneling business on her la
Lucy Lurie Grahamstown, in the rural Eastern Cape. David comes to stay with Lucy, during which tim
by three male intruders and becomes pregnant. Read More

Petrus is a black man who owns the land adjacent to Lucy Lurie's plot and helps her with
Petrus dogs. When it is revealed that one of Lucy's rapists is part of Petrus's family, Petrus offer
to protect her, an arrangement that will bring with it ownership of Lucy's land. Read Mo

Allegra Allegra is the young, unwanted daughter of Lord Byron.

Amanda is a student enrolled in David Lurie's Romantic poetry class along with Melanie
Amanda
asks David if he has sex with Amanda too.

A black customer is one of the characters in the play Sunset at the Globe Salon, which Dav
Black customer
because Melanie Isaacs is part of the cast.

In the earlier version of David Lurie's opera, Teresa Guiccioli calls out for Byron's ghost,
Byron's ghost
Byron, the famous Romantic poet and her deceased ex-lover.
 A chieftain who wears a medal and speaks in Xhosa, he keeps the guests at Petrus's party
Chieftain
he talks.

Margarita Cogni Margarita Cogni is a historical figure and one of the characters in David Lurie's early vers

Dawn is a secretary in David Lurie's department at the university. She has sons and is wa
Dawn immigrate to New Zealand. After Soraya cuts off contact, David has a brief and unsatisfyi
Dawn and then snubs her.

The female director of the play Sunset at the Globe Salon instructs Melanie Isaacs to act m
Director
of the Marx Brothers.

A young female Indian doctor attends to David Lurie's wounds after the attack, separatin
Doctor
are burned shut and examining his vision.

Driepoot is the name Bev Shaw gives to one of the condemned dogs at the shelter. David
Driepoot
special bond with Driepoot and carries him in for euthanasia in the novel's closing scene

Detective-Sergeant Esterhuyse in Port Elizabeth calls to let David Lurie know his car has
Detective-Sergeant
two arrests have been made. They are mistaken about the car being David's, and the men
Esterhuyse
who may or may not be involved have been released on bail.

Ettinger is Lucy Lurie's neighbor who speaks English with a German accent and always c
Ettinger
is an old man who has no family left in South Africa.

Evelina is Lucy Lurie's mother and David Lurie's first wife who lives in Holland. David wa
Evelina
to stay with her after the rape, but Lucy refuses.

Friend of Bill Shaw The friend of Bill Shaw sells David Lurie a pickup truck for hauling the dog corpses to the

Teresa Guiccioli becomes the center of David Lurie's opera piece. She is a historical figur
Teresa Guiccioli
affair with the Romantic poet Lord Byron when she was young.

A flamboyantly gay hairdresser is one of the characters in the play Sunset at the Globe Sa
Hairdresser
watches because Melanie Isaacs is part of the cast.

Aram Hakim is the vice-rector at the university and present at David Lurie's inquiry. He i
Aram Hakim
David.
 Helen is the former live-in girlfriend of Lucy Lurie. She has left by the time David Lurie a
Helen
with Lucy.

The crew of men who work the incinerator begin beating the corpses of the dogs David L
Incinerator crew they break into smaller shapes easier to feed into the machine. David has no relationship
incinerator crew but starts feeding the corpses into the machine himself to avoid them b

Intoxicated young After being run out of the theater by Melanie Isaacs's boyfriend, David Lurie sleeps with
prostitute young prostitute. The sex calms his nerves.

Desiree Isaacs is Melanie Isaacs's teenage sister. David Lurie fantasizes about having sex
Desiree Isaacs
sisters.

Doreen Isaacs Doreen Isaacs is Melanie Isaacs's mother.

Melanie Isaacs is a black drama student enrolled in David Lurie's Romantic poetry cours
Melanie Isaacs pressures her into having an affair with him and rapes her, she files a complaint with the
leads to David losing his job.

Mr. Isaacs is Melanie Isaacs's father. He confronts David Lurie, and later, when David apo
Mr. Isaacs
he must do what God wants him to do in addition to being sorry.

A balding janitor is the only audience member besides David Lurie attending rehearsal o
Janitor at the Globe Salon in which Melanie Isaacs performs. He is unimpressed with the amateu
leaves abruptly, with David following behind.

Katy is a female bulldog who lives with Lucy after her owners abandoned her. She is prot
Katy
home during the intrusion.

Oom Koos Oom Koos is one of the Afrikaners who sells from the farmers market stand next to Lucy

David Lurie rents a room in a house near the hospital from the landlady while he waits fo
Landlady
Lucy's baby to be born.

Prior to the committee's inquiry into the complaint against David Lurie, he speaks to a la
Lawyer at the lawyer's advice that he seek a private settlement, where Melanie Isaacs's family w
charge in exchange for David undergoing counseling.
 A locksmith changes the locks on David Lurie's car when it is vandalized immediately aft
Locksmith
confrontation with Melanie Isaacs's boyfriend.

Manas Mathabane is a professor of Religious Studies and the chairperson of the committ
Manas Mathabane
investigates the charges against David Lurie.

Tante Miems Tante Miems is one of the Afrikaners whose farmers market stand is next to Lucy Lurie's

The first time David Lurie volunteers with Bev Shaw at the animal clinic, an old woman h
Old woman billy goat with a severely wounded scrotum. There is nothing Bev can do for the animal,
to euthanize it, but the old woman takes the goat away.

Dr. S. Otto Dr. S. Otto replaces David Lurie at the university. He specializes in applied languages.

Pauline Pauline is Melanie Isaacs's cousin and roommate.

Petrus's wife, who is the second wife of Petrus, lives with him on Lucy Lurie's land. She is
Petrus's wife
speaks only Xhosa. Lucy gives her a bedspread.

Pollux is a disabled adolescent who is one of the three men who rape Lucy Lurie. He turn
Pollux
of Petrus's family and ends up living with Petrus.

Professor in Business A professor at the business school is a member of the committee set up to investigate the
School David Lurie.

Farodia Rassool is head of a committee on discrimination at the university. She is a mem

Farodia Rassool
committee set up to investigate the charges against David Lurie.

The university rector hears the recommendations of the committee's investigation into D
misconduct and is responsible for making a decision as to whether David will be discipli
Rector
hearing, David rejects the rector's offer of adopting a statement prepared by the universi
for a chance to keep his job.

While waiting for Lucy Lurie's baby to be born, David Lurie rents a room in a boarding h
Retired schoolteacher
other occupant is a retired schoolteacher.
 Rosalind is David Lurie's second ex-wife, with whom he has a tense friendship. Rosalind
Rosalind disapproval and disgust regarding David's affair with Melanie, which she heard about th
mill.

Ryan is Melanie Isaacs's older biker boyfriend. He aggressively confronts David Lurie sev
Ryan
sexual relationship with Melanie.

Bev Shaw runs a veterinary clinic in Grahamstown. She is a friend of Lucy Lurie's and be
Bev Shaw
confidante, mentor, and finally a lover to David Lurie when he volunteers at her clinic.

Bill Shaw is the husband of Bev Shaw. He assumes that he and David Lurie are friends an
Bill Shaw
from the hospital after David's burns are treated.

The short man in overalls is one of the gang of three who rape Lucy Lurie and burn David
Short man in overalls
home.

Soraya is the Muslim escort with whom David has sex every Thursday afternoon. She bre
Soraya
arrangement after David encounters her in town with her two young sons.

After the first Soraya stops contact with David, he briefly sleeps with another escort from
Soraya 2
agency, also named Soraya, but younger.

David Lurie knew nothing about Soraya's life until he encountered her in town with two
Soraya's two sons her sons. David begins to have familial fantasies about the boys, and the relationship bet
Soraya becomes strained until she breaks off contact with David.

A female student reporter and member of Women Against Rape (WAR), she blocks David
Student reporter his committee hearing and forces an interview out of him. The interview becomes the ba
on Lurie's situation, "Who's the Dunce Now?" that is published in the student newspaper

Desmond Swarts is the dean of engineering and a member of the committee set up to inv
Desmond Swarts
charges against David Lurie.

The tall man in overalls is one of the gang of three who rape Lucy Lurie and burn David L
Tall man in overalls
home.

Three African women At the farmers market, three African women sell milk and meat from the stall next to Luc
 Two secretaries listen with evident curiosity when Mr. Isaacs confronts David Lurie in hi
Two secretaries
office about sleeping with Melanie.

After the attack, two young policemen come to Lucy's house to hear her statement and lo
Two young policemen
scene. Lucy tells them a version of what happened that omits her rape.

Ms. Van Wyk is a student observer from the Coalition against Discrimination and is prese
Ms. Van Wyk
Lurie's hearing.

A white customer is one of the characters in the play Sunset at the Globe Salon, which Dav
White customer
because Melanie Isaacs is part of the cast.

Elaine Winter is the chairperson of David Lurie's department. She has never liked him an
Elaine Winter
his inquiry.

At the farmers market where Lucy Lurie sells produce, her stall neighbors, Tante Miems
Young assistant
have a boy assistant who wears a balaclava.

The first time David Lurie volunteers with Bev Shaw at the animal clinic, he helps restrai
Young boy with dog
young boy has brought in while Bev lances its infection.

Disgrace | Character Analysis

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David Lurie
David Lurie is a stubborn and proud man. He rapes his student, Melanie Isaacs. After his actions are
brought to light, he confesses to having slept with her but does not apologize or show remorse. His
refusal to acquiesce to the demands of his colleagues who want him to make a public apology leads
to the loss of his job and his relocation to his daughter's rural home. David's experience of being
locked in a bathroom and set on fire—which he puts out—during his daughter's rape and his
volunteer position at a local animal clinic begin to change him. He is humbled and acquires the
ability to give love, even if only in a small way, to the dogs that are about to be euthanized.

Lucy Lurie
Lucy Lurie is more mature, practical, and responsible than her father. She bears her rape and
subsequent pregnancy with grace, understanding it as a way to further a postapartheid
reconciliation by paying some of the price for history's wrongs. Lucy follows her inner moral
compass and does not allow her father's hysteria to control her actions. She is set on being a good
person and a good mother to her unborn child.

Petrus
As a middle-aged black man belonging to the Xhosa people, Petrus is taking advantage of the end of
apartheid to establish his family in a position of power as landowners. He begins as Lucy Lurie's
helper but soon acquires part of her land and builds his own house. Lucy's rape turns out to be
connected to Petrus's ambitions to own all of Lucy's land. When he offers to marry her in exchange
for his protection (and her land) after the rape, Lucy accepts.

Disgrace | Character Map

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DaughterFriendsNeighborsRapistRelativesStudentMentorDavid LurieDisgraced, delusionalex-

professorLucy LuriePractical young homesteaderPetrusAmbitious Xhosa patriarchPolluxDisabled
Xhosa adolescentMelanie IsaacsTimid, attractivedrama studentBev ShawEmpathetic
volunteerveterinarian

• Main Character

• Other Major Character

• Minor Character
Disgrace | Plot Summary
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Summary

The Scandal
David Lurie is a middle-aged, cynical, white scholar specializing in Romantic poetry but unhappily
employed as a professor of communications at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. He has been
twice divorced and has a grown daughter, Lucy Lurie, who lives on a homestead in the Eastern Cape.
David considers himself a disciple of Romantic poet William Wordsworth and is toying with the idea
of writing an operetta based on the life of another Romantic poet, Lord Byron. David's trouble begins
when the prostitute he has been sleeping with for a year drops him as a client. David is faced with
the problem of satisfying his immense sexual appetite at an age when he is no longer particularly
attractive to women. As a result, he coerces one of his young students, Melanie Isaacs, into a brief
sexual affair that includes raping her. In addition, David falsifies Melanie's grades and attendance
record in her favor.
Melanie drops out of David's class and files a sexual harassment complaint. A committee of David's
colleagues is convened to hear both sides of the story and make a recommendation to the university
rector as to how to deal with David in light of the charge. David immediately pleads guilty without
having read Melanie's charge against him. The committee wants David to confess the story of his
liaison and make a sincere show of contrition for wrongdoing in order to save his job. David refuses
to compromise by doing this or by endorsing a prepared statement. He quits the job and leaves Cape
Town to go stay with his daughter, Lucy, on her homestead in the Eastern Cape near Grahamstown.

The Move to Grahamstown

Lucy makes a living kenneling dogs and selling produce at the farmers market. She is as practical,
down-to-earth, and responsible as David is not. Her black Xhosa neighbor, Petrus, has become her
coproprietor. A government grant has enabled Petrus to purchase part of Lucy's land and begin
building a house of his own. Despite his insistence that he doesn't want to do anything that might
make him into a better person, David reluctantly begins assisting Lucy's friend Bev Shaw at the
volunteer clinic, where she treats sick animals and euthanizes those who are beyond treatment.
One day three locals—two men and a teenager—come to Lucy's house. Petrus is nowhere to be
found. They lock David in the bathroom and set him on fire, which he quickly puts out. While he is
locked away, they rape Lucy. They then rob the house and take off in David's car. David is in shock;
however, Lucy is calm and takes charge, getting David medical help. She reports the robbery to the
police, but not the rape. David cannot understand why she does not report the rape. However, she
tells David that the rape is a private matter and that it is possibly understandable as a form of taking
back what is due from the legacy of colonialism.

David will not stop pestering Lucy about the incident, insisting she must leave and start a new life
elsewhere. He is very suspicious of Petrus's absence during the attack and Petrus's cool, evasive
attitude about the incident once he returns. Later Petrus throws a party celebrating his new status as
a landowner. David encounters the adolescent who raped Lucy there and confronts the boy, starting
a scene. The boy claims ignorance, and Petrus intervenes and defends the boy.

As distance grows between David and Lucy, David begins assisting Bev in euthanizing dogs at the
clinic, an activity that moves David deeply in ways he does not understand. Despite the fact that he
finds Bev unattractive, he begins an affair with her.

The detectives call with news they've found David's car, but it turns out to be the wrong one. He and
Lucy have a heated discussion about what she should do. She is firm that she will not leave her home
and that he doesn't understand what happened to her. David says he does understand that she was
raped and terrified and he did not help her. He writes her a letter begging her to leave for her own
safety, and she writes back saying his guidance is not helpful to her. David leaves the farm to return
to Cape Town.

The Return to Cape Town

On his way back, David stops to talk to Melanie Isaacs's father and ends up going to the family home
for dinner. David apologizes to the family. Mr. Isaacs tells David that he must consider what God
wants him to do besides be sorry.

David returns home to find that his house has been robbed while he was away. He feels useless,
hopeless, and unwanted as well as guilty for abandoning the dogs at the clinic. He begins writing his
Byron opera using a toy banjo that was Lucy's when she was a child. He becomes consumed by the
work and begins to understand what art is.

When he meets his ex-wife Rosalind for coffee, she criticizes him for ruining his life for Melanie
Isaacs. David begins to long for Melanie again and goes to watch a play she is acting in. Melanie's
boyfriend runs David out of the theater and tells him Melanie hates him. On the way home, David,
who is shaken, stops and has sex with an intoxicated young prostitute. He is surprised at the ease
with which this brings him back to a state of calm.

The Pregnancy
Suspicious that something has changed with Lucy, David makes an excuse to return to her farm. She
reveals she is pregnant from the rape and will keep the child. David finds this preposterous and
becomes outraged that his legacy will be thus tainted. He learns that the boy who raped Lucy, Pollux,
is part of Petrus's family. When David confronts Petrus, Petrus says he will marry Lucy to protect
her, since Pollux is too young to do so. While acknowledging that Petrus is after her land, Lucy
accepts Petrus's deal, though on her own terms. She will turn her land over to him as a dowry, but
the house will remain hers, and her child must be accepted by Petrus as part of his family.

Later, David attacks Pollux when he finds him spying on Lucy. Lucy makes it clear that David's
outbursts have destroyed her peace. He leaves the farm and takes up residence behind the animal
clinic to wait for the birth of Lucy's child. He continues to help Bev while he works on the opera.
One day David goes to the farm uninvited, and Lucy asks him in like a visitor. She tells him she wants
to be a good person and that he should try to do the same. David thinks that might be worthwhile
and turns his thoughts to being a grandfather. At the clinic, David has become particularly attached
to one crippled dog. The novel closes with David bringing the dog in to be euthanized.

Disgrace Plot Diagram

123456789101112131415ClimaxResolutionIntroductionRising ActionFalling Action

Introduction

1Soraya drops David as a client.

Rising Action

2David rapes Melanie.

3Melanie files a complaint.
4David refuses to confess at his inquiry.
5David quits his job and goes to visit Lucy.
6David begins assisting Bev Shaw at the animal clinic.
7Lucy is raped, and David is burned.
8David makes a scene with Pollux at Petrus's party.
9David begins helping Bev euthanize animals.
10Lucy tells David he can't guide her, and he leaves.
Climax

11David goes to Isaacs's home and apologies.

Falling Action

12David becomes consumed by his banjo opera.

13Lucy, pregnant, accepts Petrus's marriage offer.
14David attacks Pollux.
Resolution

15David euthanizes his favorite dog.

Disgrace | Chapter Summaries

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Timeline of Events

• After apartheid ends

Soraya drops David as a client.
Chapter 1
• That winter
David rapes Melanie at her house.
Chapter 3

• A few weeks later

At his inquiry, David refuses to confess or to endorse a prepared statement to save his
job.
Chapter 6

• Shortly after
David quits and goes to stay with Lucy, who offers him indefinite "refuge."
Chapter 7

• Saturday, days later

David agrees to help Bev Shaw at the animal clinic.
Chapter 9

• Wednesday morning
Three local men rob the house, rape Lucy, and set David on fire.
Chapter 11

• Some time later

David makes a scene confronting Pollux at Petrus's party.
Chapter 15

• Shortly after
David begins assisting Bev with euthanasia of the dogs.
Chapter 16

• Some time later

Lucy tells David she doesn't need his guidance, and he leaves.
Chapter 18

• Shortly after
David eats dinner with Melanie's family and apologizes.
Chapter 19
• Shortly after
David is consumed by his opera, which he plays on a toy banjo.
Chapter 20

• Shortly after
At Melanie's play, her boyfriend runs David out of the theater.
Chapter 21

• Immediately after
David calms himself by sleeping with an intoxicated young prostitute.
Chapter 21

• Spring, some time later

David returns to the farm and learns of Lucy's pregnancy.
Chapter 22

• Shortly after
Lucy accepts Petrus's marriage deal.
Chapter 23

• Shortly after
David attacks Pollux for peeping at Lucy.
Chapter 23

• Immediately after
Lucy wants David to leave, so he starts living at the animal clinic.
Chapter 23

• Shortly after
David has a spiritual experience watching a pregnant Lucy in the flowers.
Chapter 24

• Shortly after
David euthanizes the dog he has grown close to.
Chapter 24
•

Chapter Summaries Chart

Chapter Summary

Disgrace takes place in urban Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape
Chapter 1
Africa, shortly after the end of apar...Read More

Following the end of his relationship with Soraya, David Lurie strug
Chapter 2
himself in his solitude. One evening,...Read More

The following Sunday, against his better judgment, David Lurie calls
Chapter 3
using information he copied from her...Read More

David Lurie has sex with Melanie Isaacs in his daughter Lucy's old b
Chapter 4
asks him if he frequently sleeps w...Read More

On Monday, David Lurie finds a notice in his mailbox that Melanie Is

Chapter 5
withdrawn from his class. Her father calls ...Read More

The inquiry to investigate the two charges brought against David Lu

Chapter 6
Isaacs's harassment complaint and the fal...Read More

David Lurie leaves Capetown and drives to his daughter Lucy Lurie'
Chapter 7
the town of Salem in the Eastern Cape. ...Read More

The next morning, David Lurie and Lucy Lurie go for a walk and talk
Chapter 8
he doesn't know why Melanie "denounc...Read More

On Saturday afternoon, while Petrus watches a soccer game narrate

Chapter 9
languages on TV, David Lurie goes to hi...Read More

David Lurie goes to the crowded Animal Welfare League building to

Chapter 10
He finds her in the inner room lancin...Read More

On Wednesday morning, David Lurie and his daughter Lucy Lurie go

Chapter 11
asks to hear his "case" about Melanie. ...Read More

A neighbor, Ettinger, drives David Lurie and Lucy Lurie to the hospit
Chapter 12
strength, all purposefulness," check...Read More
 As Bev Shaw changes David Lurie's bandages the day after the attac
Chapter 13
about Lucy's risk of pregnancy and diseas...Read More

The next day is Friday. As David Lurie is making repairs, Petrus retu
Chapter 14
with him the materials to build his h...Read More

When David Lurie asks Petrus to move two tethered sheep to a plac
Chapter 15
graze, Petrus refuses. Instead, Petrus...Read More

The next day, while helping Petrus work, David Lurie asks about the
Chapter 16
from the party. He tells Petrus he w...Read More

One Sunday, David Lurie and Bev Shaw talk as they finish work. She
Chapter 17
dismissal from the university and expre...Read More

Petrus ploughs his land in an afternoon using a borrowed tractor. H

Chapter 18
build a house "overlooking the farmh...Read More

David Lurie has finally left his daughter's home. On his way back to
Chapter 19
goes to the Isaacs's family home seek...Read More

Returning to Cape Town with visions of himself as a hopeless old m

Chapter 20
finds his house has been robbed. When ...Read More

Over coffee, David Lurie's ex-wife Rosalind criticizes him for making
Chapter 21
impression at his inquiry. David claims he w...Read More

Talking with his daughter, Lucy, on the phone makes David Lurie sus
Chapter 22
something has changed in her. He makes a...Read More

David Lurie returns from walking Katy the bulldog to find Pollux loo
Chapter 23
window. He strikes the boy from behin...Read More

David Lurie sits behind the clinic writing and plunking out the story
Chapter 24
Teresa Guiccioli begging for Lord By...

Disgrace | Chapter 1 | Summary

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Summary
Disgrace takes place in urban Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape region of South Africa, shortly
after the end of apartheid.
David Lurie is a divorced 52-year-old scholar specializing in Romantic poetry. He is unhappily
employed as a professor of communications at a Cape Town university, and he fails to connect with
his students in the classroom. David considers himself to be a disciple of the Romantic poet William
Wordsworth, and he nurses an unrealized desire to write an opera about the life of the Romantic
poet Lord Byron. David believes that his temperament is fixed and that he cannot and should not
change. His problem is that he is a womanizer who has lost his touch with women: "Without warning
his powers fled ... Overnight he became a ghost."
To deal with the problem of his sex drive, for the past year David has been visiting a prostitute
named Soraya on a weekly basis. He has grown affectionate toward her and has confided in her,
while she has revealed nothing of herself. The relationship serves David's needs. Then one day, he
happens to see Soraya in town with her two sons. Following that, she drops David as a client, and he
is left frustrated. After an unsatisfying and brief affair with his secretary, Dawn, David considers
castrating himself but instead tracks down Soraya and calls her home. She claims she doesn't know
who he is and orders him not to call again.

Analysis
The novel is narrated in the present tense using free, indirect discourse, which reveals the interior
monologue of protagonist David Lurie. The opening sentence focuses on David's approach to "the
problem of sex," signaling that sexuality will be an important theme in the novel. In this first chapter,
David's solution to this problem falls apart when he crosses a boundary with Soraya and begins to
have fantasies about her. David's pushing of these boundaries beyond the professional escort-client
relationship leads Soraya to retreat from him. The more she retreats, the more desperately David
clings to her, and eventually she ends the relationship. His attempts are completely self-centered and
do not take into account what Soraya wants or the agreed-upon terms of the escort-client
relationship.
This self-centered pursuit of sexuality, which verges on the predatory, is an important aspect of
David's personality. Another important aspect is his stubborn insistence on both the improbability
and uselessness of change in middle age. Both these parts of his personality will be tested as the
novel progresses.

David is also presented as a scruffy anachronism, out of step with the era and those who surround
him. His connections with people are largely in his head, such as the invented connection with
Soraya. He fails to reach his students, despite being passionate about literature. The numerous
literary and cultural allusions in this chapter are windows into David's inner world. His point of view
is dated, and the motivation for his actions is a mystery to those around him.

Chapter 2 | Summary
Summary
Following the end of his relationship with Soraya, David Lurie struggles to occupy himself in his
solitude. One evening, he runs into Melanie Isaacs, a student in his Romantic poetry course, and
persuades her to come to his house. He wonders if he is "prepared" to undertake something with
Melanie. He is very attracted to her physically but knows that "they will have to meet again as
teacher and pupil." He tries to talk to her about literature but fails to engage her. Despite this, she
reluctantly accepts his invitation to stay for dinner though she remains uninterested. After dinner,
David pours her a drink and invites her to spend the night, telling her she ought to do so because "a
woman's beauty does not belong to her alone ... she has a duty to share it." Melanie's manner is
ambivalent, and so David tries to woo her by quoting a Shakespeare sonnet: "From fairest creatures
we desire increase ... that thereby beauty's rose might never die." Melanie leaves immediately,
obviously turned off.
Analysis
David's attempt to have sex with Melanie, from start to finish, is full of indicators that they have no
real connection. The narrator describes David's feelings for Melanie as "mildly smitten," adding that
"it is no great matter," as David feels this way about a student every semester. He is as unimpressed
with her personality as she seems to be with his. However, David does not care if they don't connect
since he only wants to use Melanie for sexual release.

There is a single moment when David considers the possible complications of having sex with a
student. In that moment David asks himself whether he should pursue Melanie. However, he does
not answer his own question. When he tells Melanie he wants her to do "something reckless" by
sleeping with him, he uses the term reckless as an attempt to make sleeping with him seem more
attractive, without having comprehended himself just how reckless crossing the teacher-student
boundary will be.
With his quoting of Shakespeare and his insistence that Melanie has a duty to share her beauty with
the world, it becomes clear that David's values are not aligned with a moral compass but rather with
his poetic and aesthetic conceits. He sees neither Melanie nor himself clearly but only through the
lens of some romantic ideal.

Chapter 3 | Summary
Summary
The following Sunday, against his better judgment, David Lurie calls Melanie Isaacs using
information he copied from her student enrollment card. He pressures her into going to lunch with
him. She is clearly uneasy at the restaurant, and he assures her that he "won't let it go too far"
between them. She is "passive" when they have sex back at his house. Afterward, "he tumbles into
blank oblivion" while still on top of her. She leaves quickly.
The following day, Monday, Melanie doesn't come to class. David is in a state of elation and sends her
flowers. On Tuesday he encounters her and insists on giving her a ride home. He realizes she is "no
more than a child" but is intensely attracted to her body. She rejects his efforts to make plans to see
her again.
On Wednesday, Melanie is in class as David lectures to a silent room on Wordsworth's epic poem The
Prelude and the poet's view of the mountain called Mont Blanc. In the passage they are reading, the
poet expresses his grief on encountering the long-sought mountain because a "soulless image" has
replaced "a living thought." David finally grabs his students' attention when he claims that the poet's
seeing the mountain is like the act of seeing a beloved woman. He and Melanie exchange eye contact,
and David believes she knows he is speaking "covert intimacies" to her.
David goes to watch a rehearsal of a student play called Sunset at the Globe Salon about the New
South Africa, which makes fun of the "coarse old prejudices." Melanie plays a young woman applying
for a job but messes up her performance by tangling her prop, a broom, in an electric cord. David
feels ashamed for "spying" or "letching" on her and leaves.
David surprises Melanie by showing up uninvited at her apartment. He pushes his way in and has
sex with her, despite her insistence that she does not want to. Physically she is unresisting.
Afterward she tells him to go. Out in his car, David imagines she is bathing and wants a bath himself.
He is depressed, and he tells himself he has just made a "huge mistake." He thinks it was "not rape,
not quite that, but undesired nevertheless ... to the core."

Melanie misses class and the midterm the next day, but he marks her present and records a grade of
70. She is gone for a week. Then, Sunday at midnight, she shows up at David's house and spends the
night. In the morning she breaks down crying and asks if she can stay with him for a time. He is
hesitant and wonders, "What game is she playing?" but lust prompts him to agree. When he returns
from teaching morning classes, he becomes irritated that she is on her way out the door. He is
resentful, thinking she is exploiting him, but he also remembers that he has been exploiting her.
Analysis
In this chapter the coercive persuasion that characterized David's first attempt to seduce Melanie
becomes outright force. While David may be unclear about whether or not he has raped Melanie, her
clear and repeated verbal withholding of consent signifies to the reader that he has. David holds a
deeply misogynistic attitude and views himself as a subject and women as purely objects. Critics are
divided on whether or not David's seduction of Melanie in this scene should be called a rape. As
scholar Lianne Barnard points out, the scene illustrates the sometimes problematic nature of
determining the border between rape and consensual sex. Barnard says, "Although some readers
find that Melanie was willingly seduced, others consider that she was raped." Ultimately, readers
must draw their own conclusion. This guide will refer to David's sexual violation of Melanie as rape,
as her unwillingness clearly indicates a border that was crossed.

This chapter evokes the racialized context of the postapartheid New South Africa. David further
objectifies Melanie by reflecting on her dark skin, and it becomes clear that racial difference is one of
the many power differences between Melanie and David. David is as unaware of his racism as he is of
his predatory sexuality. Watching Melanie perform in a play about racial conflict, David's response is
dismissive based on his evaluation that the play lacks artistic merit. He cannot see or understand
that the play reflects both society and his own internalized racism.

Chapter 4 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie has sex with Melanie Isaacs in his daughter Lucy's old bed. Afterward she asks him if he
frequently sleeps with students and suggests that he is "collecting" her as a sexual prize.
Melanie's boyfriend comes to David's office at the university. He violently confronts David over his
sexual liaisons with Melanie and threatens him. That night David's car is vandalized while parked in
front of his house.

The next time Melanie comes to David's class, her boyfriend is with her. David lectures about the
scandalous life of the poet Lord Byron and begins to read from a Byron poem, Lara, which he says is
about Lucifer. Melanie's boyfriend is the only one who engages with David as he questions the class
about the poem. The Lucifer of the poem has a "mad heart" and "doesn't act on principle but on
impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him."
After class, David takes Melanie to his office and tells her she has to improve her attendance and
make up the exam she missed. She is shocked but silent. "You have cut me off from everyone," she
seems to be thinking. "You have made me bear your secret," she says. David tells her not to
complicate things and that he has responsibilities he must keep. That evening he sees Melanie riding
on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle.

Analysis
A clear link has been established between Melanie Isaacs and David's daughter, Lucy. David is aware
of this link, finding himself slipping into a parental attitude with Melanie and having sex with her in
Lucy's old bed.

The violent attitude of Melanie's boyfriend suggests that David may not be the only abusive male in
her life. Melanie's practiced passivity indicates that she may have been violated before, whether
emotionally or physically. The formerly private matter between David and Melanie is now rapidly
becoming public. David is headed for a judgment of his actions with Melanie.

The poetry David shares in his class has strong symbolic aspects. Previously David was clearly
describing his feelings for Melanie when he lectured on Wordsworth's image of Mont Blanc. In
this chapter the Lucifer character in the Byron poem is clearly a symbol for David, who notes in
his lecture that readers of Lara "are not asked to condemn this being with the mad heart ... On
the contrary, [they] are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy."
David's treatment of Byron's Lucifer offers the reader an interpretive lens through which David
himself can be understood. Like Byron's Lucifer, "It will not be possible to love [David], not in the
deeper, more human sense of the word. He will be condemned to solitude."

Chapter 5 | Summary
Summary
On Monday, David Lurie finds a notice in his mailbox that Melanie Isaacs has withdrawn from his
class. Her father calls him and asks him to convince Melanie not to drop out of school. David is
hesitant but calls Melanie, who refuses to speak to him. On Friday Melanie's father comes to the
school and confronts David about sleeping with Melanie. David walks away from him.
The next day, Saturday, David is summoned to the vice-rector's office to discuss the sexual
harassment complaint Melanie has filed. David imagines Melanie is incapable of filing the complaint
herself. Instead he fantasizes that Melanie was forced to so by her father and her roommate.

That afternoon, David meets with Vice-Rector Aram Hakim; his department chair, Elaine Winter; and
the chair of the university's discrimination committee, Farodia Rassool. Elaine Winter says they are
investigating the harassment complaint as well as the apparent discrepancy in Melanie's grades and
attendance. David says he has no defense. Hakim, obviously sympathetic to David, explains that
there will be a hearing in which a committee makes a recommendation to the rector regarding if and
how David should be disciplined.

David realizes the whole university is abuzz with gossip about him. When he calls his lawyer, the
lawyer suggests he agree to counseling in exchange for Melanie dropping the charge. This suggestion
offends David. Meanwhile, on campus, it is Rape Awareness Week. The student organization Women
Against Rape puts a pamphlet under David's door bearing the handwritten threat, "Your days are
over, Casanova."

David discusses the situation with his second ex-wife, Rosalind. She tells him she has no sympathy
and finds the entire situation "disgraceful." David tells her he plans to visit his daughter, Lucy.
Rosalind alerts David the following day that there is a story, with sensationalized and inaccurate
details, about his situation in the newspaper.

Analysis
In the previous chapter David became associated with Lucifer through his lecture on the Lord Byron
poem Lara. Coetzee does not portray David as an evil character but as one whose flawed thinking,
rebellious pride, and lack of self-understanding lead him to commit crimes. In this chapter, as the
crime of his sexual relationship with Melanie Isaacs becomes public knowledge, David becomes
disgraced in the eyes of everyone from his ex-wife to the local newspaper.
In addition to this outward or public disgrace, Mr. Isaacs's words to David evoke disgrace in its
spiritual or religious aspect. Melanie's father implies that David has fallen out of God's favor, an
aspect of disgrace that affects one's soul rather than his reputation. David's assessment of himself as
a "disgraced disciple of William Wordsworth" suggests that he is aware of his spiritual disgrace.
However, the chapter's closing lines, an excerpt from Wordsworth's Prelude, suggest David's
ambivalence or uncertainty. Some part of him still identifies with the innocent, and blessed,
character from the epic poem.

Chapter 6 | Summary
Summary
The inquiry to investigate the two charges brought against David Lurie—Melanie Isaacs's
harassment complaint and the falsification of her grades—is chaired by religious studies professor
Manas Mathabane. The committee consists of several of David's male and female colleagues. It is
tasked with hearing both sides of the story and making a recommendation to the rector as to how
David should be dealt with.

Accepting Melanie Isaacs's statement without having read it, David immediately pleads guilty to both
charges. When asked what exactly he is pleading guilty to, he responds that he is pleading guilty to
what he is charged with. Dr. Farodia Rassool suggests he consult a priest or "undergo counseling,"
and David responds that he is "a grown man ... not receptive to being counseled." Dr. Rassool objects
to David's responses, which she characterizes as "evasive" and "mockery," claiming "the wider
community is entitled to know" the specifics of what David claims to be guilty of. Questioning his
sincerity, she suggests the committee recommend that David be fired immediately.

Committee member Desmond Swarts, the dean of engineering, and Vice-Rector Aram Hakim jump in,
expressing that they wish to help David keep his job. In turn David offers a confession. He claims that
after meeting Melanie Isaacs one evening, he "became a servant of Eros." Swarts replies that David
erred in "mixing power relations with sexual relations." Dr. Rassool objects that David's confession
fails to acknowledge that he abused Melanie Isaacs. David makes "no mention of the pain he has
caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part." Swarts suggests David
consider a compromise by making a public statement of wrongdoing that would allow him to keep
his job. David responds, "I took advantage of my position ... It was wrong, and I regret it." Dr. Rassool
questions David's sincerity again, and he responds that Melanie's request is "preposterous" and
"beyond the scope of the law."

As David leaves the inquiry, he is mobbed by a group of student reporters from Women Against
Rape. When asked if he is sorry for what he did, David responds, "No ... I was enriched by the
experience." In the student paper the next day, there is a sensationalized article and photograph of
David.

Mathabane calls David, offering him one last chance to save his job by accepting a prewritten
statement. The statement acknowledges "serious abuses of the human rights of the complainant, as
well as abuse of the authority" David was given as professor. Mathabane says if David will make the
statement, the rector will "accept it in ... a spirit of repentance." David responds, "Repentance
belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse." Mathabane tells him, "What goes on in
your soul is dark to us ... You are being asked to issue a statement," and that his sincerity is no
matter. David refuses the compromise.

Analysis
The inquiry scene functions as a comment on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The
TRC began its proceedings in 1995, shortly after the end of apartheid. The TRC aimed to fashion a
unified, reconciled New South Africa by means of the public accounts of the victims and confessions
of the perpetrators of crimes committed during apartheid. The perpetrators were offered amnesty
from their crimes in accordance with how fully they confessed them, as judged by the commission
panel. In other words, criminals were declared innocent of their crimes if they confessed them fully.
Some critics have accused the TRC of sacrificing justice in the name of truth. Another criticism of the
TRC is that while it granted amnesty to many human rights abusers, it failed on its promises of
compensation to victims.

Coetzee seems to be suggesting there is an issue with public confession, especially when that
confession functions to erase guilt or liability. As David suggests here, the inquiry seems to be split
among disparate "universe[s] of discourse" or paradigms of meaning. David treats the inquiry as if it
is a legal matter. The committee insists otherwise. They say their processes are not legal procedures.
Instead the committee invokes questions of sincerity, contrition, wrongdoing, and repentance—
private and spiritual matters that do not make sense outside those worlds of discourse. A sincere
confession may put a wrongdoer's conscience at ease, but it does nothing for the victim. Further, a
sincere confession can't be forced as part of a bargain.
David refuses to give the university what it wants: a public confession that at least appears to be
made in "a spirit of repentance." This kind of "false" confession would simply be a way of saving face
and allowing David to maintain his employment. Through David's response, Coetzee suggests that
the university is willing to compromise justice, much like the TRC.

David's stubbornness also has roots in his Romantic values of truth and beauty. David is unwilling to
endorse a version of the truth to which he does not subscribe. He is not convinced of the immorality
of his actions with Melanie. He has subsumed the experience into the Romantic idea that what he can
conceive of as beautiful is true and right. While he thought of the incident as "not quite rape"
immediately afterward, by the time of the inquiry David presents the incident as "enriching" and
describes himself as "a servant of Eros." Eros, also known as Cupid, is a powerful god in Greek
mythology. His arrows, which he shoots blindly, inspire love in those he strikes, rendering helpless
those he hits by inflaming them with uncontrollable passion.

David refuses to hear Melanie's version of the story, and Mathabane, in the proceedings, neither
reads nor summarizes Melanie's statement. This keeps the reader, like the public and David himself,
in the dark about Melanie's perspective. Through this omission, Coetzee seems to be claiming that
the erasure of women's perspectives of sexual violence is a feature of society. While Rassool and
Winter, as females, are adversarial toward David, his male colleagues ooze sympathy. This bolsters
the idea that what David has done is part of a longstanding pattern of abuse of women by men in
positions of power.

Chapter 7 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie leaves Capetown and drives to his daughter Lucy Lurie's homestead in the town of
Salem in the Eastern Cape. Lucy makes her living kenneling dogs and selling produce at the local
farmers market. It is another world for David, whose attitude wavers between appreciation and
criticism.
David stays in the room formerly occupied by Helen, whom he never liked. Helen appears to have
been Lucy's ex-girlfriend, though she has left.

On a walk around the property, David meets Katy, a female bulldog abandoned by her owners. David
also meets Petrus, Lucy's black neighbor who has gone from being her helper to a coproprietor. He is
middle aged and lives in the stable with his second wife.
David says he is thinking of staying a week. He and Lucy speak of the problems David left behind.
Lucy offers him "refuge on an indefinite basis." She tells her father that his unwillingness to
compromise with the university administration was not "heroic."

Analysis
Lucy's pragmatism and equilibrium bring David's capriciousness and melodramatic tendencies into
sharp relief. In another contrast, the rural Eastern Cape is a world apart from the urban Cape Town,
although David is an outsider in both places. Like Lucifer in Byron's poem Lara who "stood a
stranger in this breathing world," David's outsider status follows him where he goes.
David characteristically uses animal metaphors to conceptualize his experiences, often in terms of
castration, killing, or the dynamics of predator/prey. Now, however, he is confronted with a host of
real animals, forcing him to shift from his habit of living in his imagination to living in Lucy's world,
which is firmly grounded in reality.
Lucy's presence causes David to see himself as if through her eyes. He becomes self-conscious of his
physicality, noting that there is "nothing so distasteful to a child as the workings of a parent's body."
He also censors himself when speaking about the university inquiry, realizing that from Lucy's point
of view, he sounds "melodramatic, excessive."

Although David is her parent, Lucy's calm, mature perspective guides and moderates David's
behavior. While he met the university's disapproval with stubborn, arrogant indifference, David does
not want his daughter to see his disgrace. He wants her to understand and respect him. This suggests
that Lucy may be the weak point in the armor of David's temperament, the catalyst that overcomes
his fervent resistance to any sort of inner transformation.

Chapter 8 | Summary
Summary
The next morning, David Lurie and Lucy Lurie go for a walk and talk. David suggests he doesn't
know why Melanie "denounce[d]" him. He quotes a line from Blake, "Sooner murder an infant in its
cradle than nurse unacted desires," and tells his daughter that he has gained self-knowledge from
every sexual liaison he has had with a woman. Lucy voices quiet acceptance when David asks if the
life she has is the one she wants.
The next day, Saturday, David accompanies Lucy to the farmers market where she runs a stall. She is
friendly with many of her customers, one of whom is Bev Shaw, "a dumpy, bustling little woman"
who runs a charity veterinary clinic and animal refuge at the site of the closed-down Animal Welfare
League in Grahamstown.

On the way home, they stop at the house of Bev Shaw and her husband, Bill. Bill welcomes David
warmly, but David is repelled by the messiness and animal odors of the house and is in no mood to
socialize. After they leave, David tells Lucy that he finds "animal-welfare people" obnoxious in the
same way as "Christians of a certain kind," and that they give him the urge to "do some raping and
pillaging. Or to kick a cat."

Lucy reads her father's harsh comment as disapproval of her way of life. She says David wishes she
would seek "a higher life," filled with intellectual pursuits, but that "this is the only life there is.
Which we share with animals." She tries to follow Bev's example in devoting her work to the care of
animals. David replies, "We are of a different order of creation from the animals" and says kindness
toward them should not be motivated by guilt.

Analysis
In this chapter Lucy and David have some significant conversations. Lucy talks to her father about
his problem with Melanie. She sees in him a desire for partnership, evident in David's habit of
attachment to his lovers, and she points this out. David presents the fact that he acted on his desires
toward Melanie as morally blank, even justified, by the ideas of William Blake. This is typical of
David's moral paradigm, which holds that qualities of poetic beauty make a thing good and right. The
line is from Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (undated, but probably composed around 1790),
in which the poet puts forth the premise that sensual pursuits lead one to the spiritual world, and
that to ignore them is to damage one's soul. In the poem the proverb is spoken in the voice of Satan.
This allusion recalls David's classroom analysis of the Lord Byron poem Lara. David identifies with
the image of Lucifer as a fallen angel who is flawed, but magnetic.
David and Lucy straddle the dichotomy between the intellectual/artistic and the real/practical.
Tension arises between them when their discussion turns to their different values and beliefs
regarding animals. Lucy does not express disapproval of her father's liaison with a student, but she is
aware that David disapproves of her way of life. David's misogyny returns when he interacts with
Bev Shaw, whom he doesn't like because she "make[s] no effort to be attractive." He knows his way
of thinking is out of date, yet he is too apathetic to do anything to change it. As he did at the start of
the novel, David believes his temperament is fixed and unchangeable.

Chapter 9 | Summary
Summary
On Saturday afternoon, while Petrus watches a soccer game narrated in indigenous languages on
TV, David Lurie goes to his daughter's room. Lucy Lurie is reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a
Charles Dickens novel. He wonders what she thinks of him as a father. He is also curious about her
sex life and inclinations and wonders if it is possible for them to talk about this. Lucy suggests he
help Petrus, who has bought some of Lucy's land with a Land Affairs grant and who hopes to soon
build his own house. She also suggests David help Bev Shaw at the veterinary clinic. He responds
that he isn't interested in "mak[ing] reparation for past misdeeds" or becoming a better person.
David goes out and falls asleep in the kennel with Katy, the bulldog abandoned by her owners. Lucy
finds him there. David tells her that the Catholic Church has decided animals lack souls. Lucy
responds that she doesn't know if she herself has a soul. David tells her, "We are all souls ... before
we are born." Lucy says she will keep Katy and explains that Bev Shaw's work at the clinic involves
euthanizing animals. Suddenly seized by empathy and sadness, David apologizes for his faults as a
father and agrees to help Bev Shaw.

Analysis
In Petrus, David confronts the realities of postapartheid South Africa. The soccer game is now
reported in the indigenous languages of Sotho and Xhosa rather than in English or Afrikaans.
Petrus's purchase of part of Lucy's land is government subsidized. As David notes, the old lines are
no longer drawn. These events symbolize the shifts in power between the races that has been
brought about by the end of apartheid. David may be a white-skinned English speaker, but despite all
his learning and privilege, he is now an outsider in the New South Africa. The local language as well
as the culture are unintelligible to him.
His exclusion from society and political power is emphasized when he leaves the house and falls
asleep in the kennel of Katy, the female bulldog abandoned by her owners. While black men like
Petrus may be rising in status, females and animals remain at the bottom of the hierarchy. David's
beliefs and actions, such as his rape of Melanie Isaacs and his claim that animals lack souls, reinforce
this subordination. However, he is starting to change. He feels a sadness for "Katy, alone in her cage,
for himself, for everyone." He also apologizes to his daughter and agrees to help Bev Shaw in the
animal clinic. His old attitudes are beginning to shift.

Chapter 10 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie goes to the crowded Animal Welfare League building to assist Bev Shaw. He finds her in
the inner room lancing the mouth of a dog, and he helps her restrain the dog so she can work. She
tells him to be calm because animals "can smell what you are thinking." She then comments that he
must like animals, and he responds that he likes eating them.
Next an old woman brings in a goat whose scrotum has been injured by a dog's attack. Seeing that
the wound is far advanced, Bev leans into the goat and begins to speak to it, and both she and the
animal appear to be in a trance. She tells the old woman that she cannot help the goat but can "give
him a quiet end" to end the goat's pain. However, the woman leaves with her animal. Comforting
Bev, David suggests that the goat, being African, is "born prepared" to die. He realizes that the clinic
is "a place not of healing ... but of last resort" and that Bev is "not a veterinarian but a priestess."
He and Bev talk as they feed the dogs. She tells him that she "mind[s] deeply" euthanizing the
animals. She asks about his circumstances, and he says he is "not just in trouble. In what I suppose
one would call disgrace." She implies she can use his help euthanizing the animals.

That night after dinner, as he overhears Lucy Lurie talking on the phone, he wonders if she is talking
to Helen and begins to consider her love life. He wonders if Helen and Lucy have sex or "perhaps
they sleep together merely as children do ... sisters more than lovers." He does not like that she is a
lesbian. However, he finds himself more concerned with her than he was before. As a daughter, "She
becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn." Later, he cannot sleep. Instead he reads
the letters of Lord Byron written in 1820 when the poet was 32 years old. As he reads these letters,
David contemplates the fleeting nature of youth.

Analysis
Two important thematic concepts return in this chapter. Earlier, David had considered castration as
a way to deal with the problem of his unsatisfied sexual desires. This idea becomes a reality here in
the form of a goat with a damaged scrotum. David also toyed with the idea that death was an answer
to the problem of living with unfulfilled desires. This idea also becomes a reality as the clinic
practices euthanasia on infirm animals. Perhaps David can be vulnerable with Bev because he can, in
some way, relate to the work that she does. It is to Bev that David admits his state of disgrace for the
first time. The understanding that follows—that he can help her with the euthanasia of animals—
suggests that his state of disgrace will be affected by his relationship with her and his work in the
clinic.

Chapter 11 | Summary
Summary
On Wednesday morning, David Lurie and his daughter Lucy Lurie go for a walk. She asks to hear his
"case" about Melanie. He says his case "rests on the rights of desire." Then he tries to explain his
thinking. He tells Lucy a story about a neighbor's dog whose owner beat it whenever it became
excited because a female dog was nearby. After a little while, the dog would smell a female and
without even being beaten would show fear. David says this was wrong because it was taught "to
hate its own nature" and "at that point it would have been better to shoot it."
They pass two men and a boy walking quickly toward them and feel uneasy. Back at the house, the
men are there. The boy says they need to use the telephone because one of them has a sister who is
"very bad" and having "a baby." They say they are from a small village in the forest called
Eramuskraal. The taller, handsomer man goes into the house with Lucy, and then the second man
follows and locks the door behind him. Worried for Lucy, David kicks the door in while the dog
corners the boy. Once he is inside, though, David is immediately knocked out.

David comes to in the bathroom to the noise of the dogs still barking and the door locked. David is
frantic to do something to help Lucy, thinking that "it has come, the day of testing." The shorter man
comes in and takes David's car keys from him. Through the window, he sees the men loading Lucy's
belongings into his car. They see him and speak in an African language that David cannot
understand. He watches the tall man shoot each dog in the kennel, and then the short man opens the
bathroom door. When David tries to escape, he is pushed back in, doused with methylated spirits,
and lit on fire. He struggles to put out the fire on his body and is locked in the bathroom again. The
men leave in the car, and he calls ceaselessly for Lucy. She sets him free, and he notices that she
seems to have just bathed, which he believes implies that she was raped. He follows Lucy as they
walk through the wreckage. He tries to comfort her, but she escapes his embrace. Lucy asks David
not to talk to anyone about what happened to her. David says that keeping the attack secret is a
mistake.
Analysis
David tells the story of the beaten, self-hating dog in an attempt to defend the morality of his affair
with Melanie Isaacs. However, the story fails to convince Lucy of his point of view. Instead, the story
hints at David's personal fear that he is useless and powerless. His melodramatic claim that the best
thing to do for such a creature is to shoot it is followed by the actual shooting of all but one of Lucy's
dogs, which David watches while imprisoned in the bathroom, utterly powerless. David is
undergoing a kind of symbolic death.

While the self-hating dog represents David, the killing of the dogs is also linked to the violence of
apartheid, when dogs were trained to kill at the smell of a black person. This association gives their
massacre during the invasion another dimension of symbolic significance. The oppressed are rising
up against their oppressors with vengeance, hatred, and violence. Apartheid was a
horror; Coetzee suggests that the New South Africa is also beset with horrors.
Lucy does not explain her experience during the attack, nor does David ask. However, he knows that
she was raped, not only from a vision that set him writhing during the attack, but from the fact that
she emerges in the aftermath freshly bathed. After raping Melanie, David had imagined her taking a
bath; to him, it is what a defiled woman would do.

The fact that the word rape is not said aloud makes clear that it is a taboo subject. It is a subject
that is unspeakable even in a country where it happens all the time. It must be referred to
indirectly, through euphemism, symbol, and metaphor.

Chapter 12 | Summary
Summary
A neighbor, Ettinger, drives David Lurie and Lucy Lurie to the hospital. Lucy, "all strength, all
purposefulness," checks David, who is trembling, into the casualties room. At last he sees the doctor,
"a young Indian woman." She separates his eyelids, which were burned in the fire, and notes that his
eye is undamaged. Bill Shaw has come to pick him up, and David is taken aback when Bill calls the
Luries friends.
Back at the Shaw home, Bev runs a bath for David. Later, Bill has to help him out of the tub. That
night David wakes, having had a vision of Lucy surrounded by white light, calling out to him, "Come
to me, save me!" He wakes Lucy, desperate to speak with her, and she sends him back to bed like a
child. He cannot sleep and wonders if Lucy's soul visited him. He goes into her room and watches her
in her bed, guarding her until she falls asleep.

In the morning, he asks Bev about Lucy's condition. Bev refuses to discuss her with him and makes
clear that, as a man, Lucy's condition is not his business. David thinks that raping a lesbian is worse
than raping a virgin.

Later that morning he finds Lucy crying on the bed. He asks if she has seen a doctor. Lucy replies she
has but is irritable. She says she will return to the farm and "go on as before." David says they can't
because "it's not a good idea. Because it's not safe." Lucy replies the farm never was safe and that she
is not returning for an idea. David realizes he has no influence over her.

Analysis
The fact that David's eyesight has not been damaged suggests that he will yet learn to see and accept
reality. However, for David to change his ideas and outdated romantic beliefs, he must suffer, and he
surely has. His sense of safety has been shattered. He has failed to protect his daughter from assault,
and his own body has been violated. Again, a bath is the answer to violation, although this bath is a
humbling experience. His physical weakness demands that Bill Shaw help him out of the tub.
Through the attack and bath David is being cleansed symbolically of the notion that he can exist
apart from the help of others. He had believed that a person could live on the basis of ideas alone and
could control their own fate. Lucy's actions contradict this belief. She refuses to leave the farm even
though it seems the logical thing to do. His vision of Lucy calling out for help tells him that he has
failed his daughter in the moment when she needed him most. He is left with guilt and fear and tries
to overcompensate for his failure by pressuring her to leave. However, he is too late. His failure to
save her has compounded his disgrace, and Lucy has withdrawn from his influence for good.

Chapter 13 | Summary
Summary
As Bev Shaw changes David Lurie's bandages the day after the attack, he probes about Lucy's risk of
pregnancy and disease. He wants Lucy to see a gynecologist, but Bev says she must be the one to
discuss this with Lucy. As David waits for Lucy to appear, he feels that he has aged and his heart has
been damaged. "His pleasure in living has been snuffed out," he thinks, and he feels despair.
Back at the farm, Petrus is still absent. Two policemen come to investigate the crime scene and to
receive Lucy's statement. She gives it, looking at David the whole time and leaving out any mention
of rape. She says the whole incident lasted less than 30 minutes. David, barely listening, is
preoccupied with a childhood chant that has been reworked in his mind to reflect his feelings. He
thinks, "Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy's secret; his disgrace." The policemen say a detective
will come to fingerprint the house, and then they depart.
Ettinger arrives. He expresses mistrust of Petrus, saying, "Not one of them you can trust." He says he
will "send a boy" to repair the vehicle.

Alone with Lucy, David asks Lucy why she didn't tell the cops the whole story. She replies, "I have
told the whole story. The whole story is what I have told." David thinks that by censoring her
experience, Lucy is letting the rapists win. They will not only go free but will also leave Lucy in a
state of silent shame. David then offers to help in the only way he knows how, which is to bury the
dogs. While he buries them, he thinks about the men who shot them and how they must have been
satisfied at killing dogs that were a symbol of their oppression.

When Lucy is moving her bed into the storage pantry, he tells her to take the room where he sleeps.
He moves into Lucy's room, thinking that "the ghosts of Lucy's violators ... ought to be chased out" of
the room.

At dinner he asks her again why she withheld details of the attack. She says that since they are in
South Africa at the current time it is her private business. David says she cannot avoid vengeance,
nor can she pay for the crimes of history through her suffering and silence. Lucy responds that David
does not understand her, and she doesn't "act in terms of abstractions" like guilt and salvation. She
then ends the conversation, and their tension and distance is painful to David.

Analysis
Again, David finds himself staying in Lucy's bedroom, recalling his sexual liaisons with Melanie in
Lucy's other bedroom in Cape Town. While literally occupying her bed, David is being
metaphorically asked to put himself in her place, the place of the female, something that he cannot
do at this point. He can, however, imagine the perspective of the violators.

David had fantasized that Melanie was forced into making a sexual harassment complaint against
him. Now he takes the opposite tack with Lucy after her rape. He becomes the one who is trying to
force the victim to speak. The situation deeply affects David's emotions, and he separates himself
from it by retreating into the indifference of the aged to contemplate "Lucy's secret; his disgrace."
The semicolon indicates that these "separate" incidents in fact have the same cause. This is more
obvious to the reader than to the character.
Lucy is again presented as the opposite of her father—in this chapter, through her criteria for
making decisions and value judgments. David is all abstraction, seeing particular events through the
lens of universal archetypes. Lucy, in contrast, is clear sighted and realistic. Their differences create
an imbalance in their relationship. Lucy can understand her father, but her father simply cannot
understand Lucy, for all his education and intellect.

Chapter 14 | Summary
Summary
The next day is Friday. As David Lurie is making repairs, Petrus returns, bringing with him the
materials to build his house. David is suspicious of Petrus, who "happened" to be gone during and
after the attack. He confides his suspicions to Lucy Lurie, but she does not seem to care.
Still upset, David goes to talk to Petrus at the dam. He brings up the robbery, and Petrus seems
dismissive. He replies, "But you are all right now" and asks if Lucy will go to the farmers market the
following day. Later, when Lucy tells David to go with Petrus, David thinks it is the shame of her
disgrace that keeps her at home.

At the market David sees a story in the newspaper describing "unknown assailants" and "Ms. Lucy
Lourie and her elderly father," a misspelling of his name that David is glad for. Petrus does all the
work at the market. It is "just like the old days ... Except that he does not presume to give Petrus
orders."

David still feels uneasy regarding Petrus, although the man also intrigues him. He thinks of how
Petrus is now a neighbor rather than a subordinate. In this "new world," he wants to hear Petrus's
story, but not in English, which he is beginning to regard as "an unfit medium for the truth of South
Africa." He thinks of Petrus as a regular peasant, with "honest toil and honest cunning." He imagines
that in the future Petrus will want to take over Lucy's land, edging her and people like her out of the
picture.

Later, when he joins Petrus in work on the dam, David brings up the incident again, implying that
Lucy was raped and that he wants the offenders punished. Petrus's calm nonchalance and failure to
acknowledge the "violation" make David feel angry and violent.

David spends his days doing what Lucy used to do. He knows his burned appearance is repulsive and
thinks he has "become a ... country recluse" who has reached "the end of roving." He sends a message
to his ex-wife Rosalind that they were robbed but "nothing serious," so that she will not hear awful
gossip. But David is plagued by nightmares. He dreams that his bed is full of blood or he is fleeing a
man whose face is the head of the Egyptian moon god Thoth or an African mask. He feels he is losing
himself and thinks of his Byron project. He knows it is fear that has kept him researching for so long
and that he must begin to write down the music he hears in his head.

Analysis
David Lurie demands admission of wrongdoing from Petrus. This is similar to the way in which the
university committee demanded David admit his wrongs with the student Melanie. Petrus is evasive,
much as David was. He agrees with David but does not tell his side of the story or express the
outrage that David wants to see. However, David does not make the connection consciously,
although his nightmares of being in a bed of blood may signify his unconscious realization that his
personal history is repeating itself. He is also sleeping in Lucy's bed, just as he did in Cape Town with
Melanie, but he is blind to this parallel.
While the committee had leverage over David, David has none over Petrus. Petrus will lose nothing
by choosing to remain evasive and mostly silent. The power shift is indicative of the historical
moment. Petrus is not just the equal of the white man now but has roots on the land and a network
of family and friends. Lucy and David are isolated outsiders.
David's disgrace has become written all over his body. He thinks of himself now as "one of those
sorry creatures whom children gawk at on the street." Everything has now changed for David, but
not in the ways he hoped for. He is living a life that he once disdained, his daughter's, and his
intellectual pursuits are at a standstill. His ability to write the piece on Byron will be another test of
him. He has been tested as a father, which he had previously thought of as "a rather abstract
business." Now he faces a test of himself as a poet and artist, the part of himself he values most.

Chapter 15 | Summary
Summary
When David Lurie asks Petrus to move two tethered sheep to a place where they can graze, Petrus
refuses. Instead, Petrus invites David to the party that Saturday where the sheep will be the meal.
David finally moves the sheep himself. Lucy Lurie says the party is probably to celebrate Petrus's
soon-to-be official status as landowner.
Lately, Lucy has been snappy and moody, and David wonders if the attack has damaged her
irreversibly. Circumspectly, he asks her if she has had STD testing, and she assures him she has, that
she is just waiting to see if she is pregnant.

David feels it is hardhearted of Petrus to keep the sheep tied on bare ground and considers buying
them. Standing with the sheep, he wonders how Bev Shaw achieves "communion with animals" and
wonders if he must become like her. Lucy guesses correctly that David's unwillingness to attend
Petrus's party has to do with his attachment to the two sheep.

On Saturday, David smells the sheep cooking and wonders if it is right to mourn them. At the last
moment, he accompanies Lucy to the party. They are the sole white people there. Lucy gives Petrus's
pregnant wife, who only speaks Xhosa, the gift of a bedspread. When Petrus calls Lucy their
"benefactor," David finds the choice of word disturbing. Petrus says he hopes his child will be a boy
so he can teach his sisters how to act and because girls are very expensive to raise. He embarrasses
Lucy by saying she is "almost" "as good as a boy."

David is trying to convince himself to eat the plate of mutton when Lucy tells him one of her rapists,
the boy, is at the party. When David confronts him, Petrus quickly intervenes. Petrus says he doesn't
know the boy, who denies involvement. The confrontation brings the party atmosphere to a halt.
David says he will call the police and leaves with Lucy.

Back at the house, Lucy tells him he must hear Petrus's side of the story because she has to live
peacefully with Petrus. David thinks she wants to "make up for the wrongs of the past" and that her
silence is misguided. She tells David he doesn't know what happened that night. Contemplating how
troubled their relationship has become, David cannot understand her thinking. He is clear in his
thought that "as a woman alone on a farm she has no future."

David slips out and returns to the party to find a man in a chieftain's medal speaking in Xhosa while
the partygoers listen reverently. When David is noticed, he feels glad for his white skullcap "to wear
it as his own."

Analysis
David's fledgling moral development is evidenced by his reaction to Petrus's sheep. The man who
recently proclaimed that animal rights activists make him want to kick a cat is now preoccupied by
the plight of two condemned sheep tied on barren ground.
The sheep also symbolize the position of women in general, and Melanie and Lucy in particular.
Society treats women and animals as if they "do not own themselves" but "exist to be used." The
needs of the sheep are a burden to Petrus, who cannot be bothered to tie them where they can graze.
At the party, Petrus orates in front of his pregnant wife and Lucy, who has just been raped, about
what a burden daughters are.

David's attitudes were once much more aligned with those expressed by Petrus, both with regard to
animals and women. However, David's question of whether it is right to mourn the sheep after they
are slaughtered hints at the contrition for Melanie's rape that he has never expressed. It also
suggests that his preoccupation with his own desire has been replaced by an interest in spiritual
matters.

Chapter 16 | Summary
Summary
The next day, while helping Petrus work, David Lurie asks about the name of the boy from the party.
He tells Petrus he wants to turn the information over to the police and assures Petrus he will not
involve him personally. However, Petrus says his responsibility is keeping the peace. The boy is
angry at being called a thief and is too young to go to jail, Petrus adds. He says he knows what
happened but will protect Lucy. In Petrus's mind, the boy is not guilty because he is so young. Petrus
evades David's question regarding whether he is related to the boy.
When David speaks to Bev Shaw about his suspicions regarding Petrus, Bev insists that he can trust
Petrus and claims Petrus has been a great help to Lucy in the past. David becomes outraged when
Bev tells him that he was not there for the ordeal that Lucy went through.

It has become obvious that both he and Lucy feel his visit has lasted too long, but David is not ready
"to abandon his daughter." He is making no progress on his Byron opera, which depresses him. On
Sunday afternoons, he begins helping Bev euthanize the unwanted dogs at the clinic, holding them
while she injects them. It starts to affect him emotionally and "he does not understand what is
happening to him," yet "his whole being is gripped by what happens" during this work. He begins to
feel compassion for the doomed dogs.

He begins to take over the job of disposing of the corpses. Every Monday morning, he takes them to
the incinerator at the hospital. Finding it unacceptable that the workmen beat the corpses into pieces
that are easier to fit into the incinerator, David takes over the job of feeding the corpses to the
machine. He does this, he concludes, because he is becoming "stupid, daft, wrongheaded."

Analysis
David is frustrated with his inability to protect Lucy or persuade her of what he thinks she should do
regarding her rape. As a result, David turns to the clinic and animals. He becomes part of the process
of death, acting as a witness and guide for the animals into the next life.

As the text hints, death is the ultimate state of disgrace. However, David's position with respect to
the dogs' deaths is inherently graceful. He senses the work with euthanizing and disposing of the
animals is changing him but cannot understand how or why. He does not realize that through his
work he is atoning for his state of disgrace and finding a balance between the ideal and the real. By
doing a task that honors the sanctity and dignity of those who are powerless, he begins to question
his moral nature for the first time. However, his old temperament and ways of thinking resist these
changes in the form of self-judgment and self-belittling.

Chapter 17 | Summary
Summary
One Sunday, David Lurie and Bev Shaw talk as they finish work. She brings up his dismissal from the
university and expresses sympathy, saying he must find life here dull. He tries to imagine Bev
younger and at the height of her attractiveness. "On an impulse" he touches her lips, and she kisses
his hand.
The next day, she calls and asks him to come meet her at the clinic, which is closed Mondays. They
have sex in the locked surgery room on the floor with the lights off. Afterward he thinks, "This is
what I have come to. This is what I will have to get used to, this and even less than this."

Analysis
David's affair with Bev Shaw shakes his sexual confidence and makes him question his identity. The
events of this chapter reveal the way that the old David and the new person he is becoming coexist
within him. The affair begins because David touches Bev's lips; the gesture comes from a moment's
impulse, not true desire. Like Lucifer in Byron's poem Lara, David still acts out of impulses without
understanding their source. He has always been particularly repulsed by Bev's appearance and has
regarded her work and character with ridicule as well as pity.
In a characteristic omission of women's perspectives, the text does not give any hint of Bev's reasons
for sleeping with David. The reader must discern her motive and response by interpreting David's
thoughts, which are unreliable. Here, he imagines that Bev's motive is to help Lucy, who is dealing
with the trauma of her rape, and David's fears about her safety, which he expresses constantly. Sex
will soothe and relax David so that he will stop insisting Lucy leave her home and begin a new life.
This interpretation of Bev's motives for the affair, whether or not it is true, acts in the chapter like a
message from David's subconscious. He has not been able to consciously accept that his concern for
his daughter is hurting rather than helping her, nor that he has lost any father's authority he might
have had before the rape.

Chapter 19 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie has finally left his daughter's home. On his way back to Cape Town, he goes to the
Isaacs's family home seeking Melanie Isaacs's father. He is received by Melanie's schoolgirl sister,
Desiree, to whom he is immediately attracted. Desiree does not know who David is. He fantasizes
about a threesome with Melanie and Desiree, "an experience fit for a king."
He goes to the middle school where Mr. Isaacs works and says that he wishes to explain "what is on
my heart." He then realizes he does not know what that is. David tells Mr. Isaacs that his affair with
Melanie began as "one of those sudden little adventures ... that keep me going." Reminding him that
people used to worship fire, David tells Mr. Isaacs that Melanie lit a fire within him. Mr. Isaacs stops
David's confession, prompting David to inquire about Melanie's welfare. Mr. Isaacs says she has
resumed her studies and wonders what David plans to do with himself. "How are the mighty fallen!"
Isaacs remarks when David replies he will live with his daughter and write a book. He asks David if
he has anything more on his heart. When David says he does not, Mr. Isaacs insists David come to the
family home for dinner.

David arrives at the Isaacs's home, "a tight little petit-bourgeois household, frugal, prudent." There is
no sign of Mrs. Isaacs. When she finally appears, she is obviously uncomfortable. David tries to leave,
but Mr. Isaacs insists he must "be strong." During dinner, as David does his best to keep the
conversation going, he has a vision of a surgeon taking out his organs and throwing each one aside
disapprovingly.

After dinner, David apologizes to Mr. Isaacs: "I am sorry for what I took your daughter through." Mr.
Isaacs asks him what God wants from him besides "being very sorry." David responds he is trying to
accept his punishment, which is to be "sunk into a state of disgrace." Mr. Isaacs suggests he must do
the really brave thing and apologize to Melanie's mother. David finds Mrs. Isaacs and Desiree. He
kneels before them and touches his head to the floor, making both women uncomfortable. At home
that night, Mr. Isaacs calls and tells David his family is not going to advocate for his return to
teaching. He explains that "it is not for us to interfere" with the path God has ordained for David.
Analysis
Back in the realm where he became disgraced, David immediately begins to manifest old patterns of
thought and speech. Though Desiree is just a child and his rape of Melanie was the first cause of his
disgrace, David imagines sleeping with the sisters together and becomes physically aroused. He has
to restrain an urge to touch Desiree's lips—the same gesture that ignited his sexual relationship with
Bev Shaw. This lecherous attitude, like his pompous speech to Mr. Isaacs, suggests that David still
lacks maturity, empathy, and a sense of proper boundaries. As his vision of the surgeon suggests,
David's disgrace stems from something fundamental to his character.

When he finally apologizes to Mr. Isaacs, he does so with the sincerity and contrition that the
university tried to manipulate him into showing. However, as Mr. Isaacs points out, neither being
sorry nor accepting a life of permanent disgrace is what the situation—or God, as Mr. Isaacs says—
asks of David. David must learn from his mistake. The actions David takes will be the means and the
demonstration of his learning.

Embedded in this scene is Coetzee's criticism of the New South Africa. He seems to be saying that
there can be no healing and no moving forward to better times through mere confession and
contrition, the core elements of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The country's disgrace will
not disappear on its own. It must be changed through deliberate action.

Chapter 20 | Summary
Summary
Returning to Cape Town with visions of himself as a hopeless old man, David Lurie finds his house
has been robbed. When he goes to the university to pick up his mail, he finds his former office
occupied by a young professor of applied language studies, Dr. Otto, who has replaced him.
David is unsettled by his freedom. He feels he has betrayed the dogs that "will be tossed into the fire
unmarked, unmourned" and wonders, "For that betrayal, will he ever be forgiven?" A phone call to
Lucy makes it clear that she does not want him back.

David throws out his original idea for his opera. He no longer cares about young Teresa Guiccioli's
complaint that she must sneak behind her husband's back to have sex with Lord Byron. He is now
compelled to write about Teresa in middle age after she has lost her beauty and her lover. Her affair
with Byron was the greatest moment of her life, but Byron ridiculed her as dull to his friends and
eventually left her. David realizes that his very being depends on learning to love this middle-aged
version of Teresa.

David writes the first scene where Teresa calls out for Byron's ghost. He begins to compose the
music using an "odd little seven-stringed banjo" he bought for Lucy when she was a child. The work
shifts into the comic mode, and David realizes he is a part of the opera. However, he does not relate
to Teresa or Byron but sees himself in the actual banjo music itself. The banjo's voice "strains to soar
away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line." As he
channels the voice of a Teresa driven mad with sexual longing, he realizes that all his sexual
relationships have been prompted by the body's urge for a release that would leave him "clear-
headed and dry."

Analysis
David finally comes to understand what art really is. He has always leaned on concepts drawn from
art, particularly literature, to put distance between himself and the world around him and to justify
his behavior. David exploited art, much in the way that he exploited Melanie Isaacs. In doing so, he
not only committed wrongdoing but also cut himself off from the real power of art.
However, David has changed. He has been sincerely humbled by the results of his actions. He has
developed a real sense of morality. He has begun to understand that love is service and compassion
rather than manipulation or selfish satisfaction. He has made amends through his service to the dogs
that are euthanized at Bev Shaw's clinic.

Because of all this, David is finally able to experience what art is and "how it does its work." He "is
held in the music," which "he is inventing ... (or the music is inventing him)." His self disappears, and
he becomes completely absorbed. At the same time, his art acts as a mirror for his soul, bringing
clarity and self-knowledge. It comes to him like a gift, absurd and unexpected, and while "Teresa
leads; page after page he follows." It is a signal that David is moving toward a state of grace.

Chapter 21 | Summary
Summary
Over coffee, David Lurie's ex-wife Rosalind criticizes him for making a bad impression at his inquiry.
David claims he was acting in service of the principle of "freedom of speech. Freedom to remain
silent." Rosalind chastises him for ruining his life for Melanie Isaacs. When he protests that he has
not ruined his life, she describes the various manifestations of his social disgrace. She prophecies
that he will "end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins."
David thinks longingly of Melanie. He feels regret as he reflects that the trial was meant to "punish"
him "for his way of life." In being an old man who slept with a young woman, he committed
"unnatural acts" that threaten the reproduction that ensures the continuance of the human race.

David goes to watch Melanie's performance in the play Sunset at the Globe Salon. As he is watching
her with a sense of proud possessiveness, he is taken by a vision of all the women he has ever slept
with. He affirms he has indeed been enriched for having known them, and "his heart floods with
thankfulness." David wonders at the unknown source of these visions.
However, his reverie is broken by Melanie's boyfriend, who draws David outside by throwing
spitballs at him. "Find yourself another life," he tells David, "with your own kind." He claims Melanie
would "spit in your eye." Shaken, David leaves. He stops and picks up an intoxicated young prostitute
with whom he has sex. Afterward David notes, "She is younger than she had seemed under the
streetlights, younger even than Melanie." The sex calms him. Realizing that he is mediocre, he
wonders if that will be his "final verdict."

Analysis
Rosalind's criticism affects David deeply because she knows and exploits his greatest fears: being
old, useless, and unloved. The emotional fallout from speaking to her leads David back into his
delusional literary thinking. Working up a feeling of having been persecuted by the university
community, David falls right back into stalking Melanie.

Just when it seems that David's transformation was only an illusion, he experiences a vision that has
the transcendent emotional quality of a spiritual experience. He seems saved. Then, soon after, he
buys sex from an intoxicated young prostitute whose extreme youth and state of intoxication again
muddy the waters between consensual and nonconsensual sex. The reader is invited to contrast this
prostitute with his previous interactions with Soraya. His reaction to these two divergent
experiences shows that while his character has not changed radically, he has gained self-knowledge
and a humility that approaches spiritual faith. His resolute atheism has been replaced by a sense of
curiosity about God. His arrogance and delusions about himself are replaced by an understanding
that he is flawed, complacent, and unexceptional.
Chapter 22 | Summary
Summary
Talking with his daughter, Lucy, on the phone makes David Lurie suspicious that something has
changed in her. He makes an excuse to go visit her. Petrus's new house makes the place feel foreign.
Lucy reveals she is pregnant and will have the child. David tells her he will support her decision, but
on a solitary walk, he weeps, feeling that "suddenly everything is changed, utterly changed!"
That evening, Lucy tells David that Pollux, the boy who raped her, is the brother of Petrus's wife and
is living with Petrus. He calls the situation "ridiculous" and "sinister" and begs her to leave. They
begin to quarrel.

The next morning, David accuses Petrus of lying about his relationship to Pollux. Angry, Petrus says
he is looking after his family just as David is. The attack "is bad. But it is finish." Claiming it is
dangerous for a woman not to be married, Petrus says he will take Lucy as an additional wife, since
Pollux is too young.

David relays the proposal to Lucy, calling it blackmail. Lucy says she knows Petrus has been hinting
that her safety is at risk because he has ambitions to own her land. She tells David to relay her
response. She will marry Petrus and give him her land, but the house remains hers, and he must
accept the child as family. She agrees with David the situation is "humiliating," but she says she must
accept, starting "with nothing ... No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity ... like a
dog."

Analysis
David's hysteria about Lucy's plan to give birth to the child she is carrying results from his
preoccupation about his legacy. Previously he told Lucy his plan to write an opera stemmed from his
desire to leave something behind "with a life of its own." To say this to his own daughter is hurtful
and oblivious. Now he again treats Lucy as if she is a minor character in his story rather than the
protagonist of her own. He is also blind to the absurdity with which he weeps over the fact that Lucy
will have the child, which he imagines as a horrific creature due to the nature of its conception rather
than a regular human being. His despair is not for her sake, but for himself as "a father without the
sense to have a son." Now his legacy will "dribbl[e] into the earth" because his daughter insists on
giving birth to monster-spawn. David is fully back in his original mode of thought and action, full of
exaggerations and poetic delusions and breaking boundaries left and right.

Breaking boundaries, in the form of reversals of history, is characteristic of the New South Africa.
White and African blood will be mixed in Lucy's child. She, the educated white woman from the city,
becomes the subordinate, the dependent tenant of the provincial African through a process of sexual
violation, physical force, and coercion. In a case of dramatic irony, in which the reader is aware of
something the characters are not, these are the same tools that the imperialists used to subordinate
Africans for years.

Chapter 23 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie returns from walking Katy the bulldog to find Pollux looking in Lucy's window. He
strikes the boy from behind, calling him "swine," and the dog attacks. Lucy appears, ending the
attack, and as she tries to take the boy to clean his wound, her robe slips open to show her breasts.
Both David and the boy stare, and David becomes full of rage. Pollux runs away and repeats his
threat to kill them all. David condemns the boy, and Lucy calls him "a disturbed child." She says all
was peaceful before David's return, and she "will make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace." David
says he will leave.
David feels deep shame for his actions, but Pollux brings up an uncontrollable rage in him. He knows
he "must listen to Teresa," who is "the last one left who can save him."

David goes to see Bev Shaw at the clinic. She suggests that Lucy will be okay with Petrus and that
perhaps David should stop trying to control her. He says he will rent a room and that he will help her
in the clinic.
David buys a truck, intending to resume transporting the dead dogs, and he rents a room in a house.
He begins spending all his time in the clinic. He sets up a makeshift area for himself behind it, which
is his true home. He is waiting for the birth of Lucy's child. One day, he finds three little boys staring
at him as he is working on the opera and sees how crazy he must look through their eyes.

Analysis
David and Pollux are actually very similar. The name Pollux is a twin's name, with origins in Greek
mythology and the twin brothers Castor and Pollux. David is a twin to Pollux, whom he hates. He
thinks he is unloading honorable vengeance on the boy for raping Lucy and then staring at her
through the window, but these are things David does himself. David raped Melanie, and when Lucy's
robe falls open, he stares at her breasts along with Pollux. David also returned as a voyeur to his
victim, Melanie, watching her in the play.

The sources of David's rage are many. One is his racist attitude. Other causes are his pathological
need to control and his fundamental inability to see things—other people, himself—as they really
are. His life and his family tree are being brought into permanent association with the "Others," the
race that David, a white man formed in apartheid-era South Africa, despises—and he can do nothing
to stop this.

Lucy cannot send Pollux away, but she can make it clear to David that he needs to leave. He leaves
the farm, indignant, telling himself he is a defender of honor with an important artistic task ahead of
him. Everyone else has rejected him. Even Bev Shaw seems to have realized that David is absurdly
and dangerously self-centered and delusional. David, however, calls the trouble with Lucy "nothing"
and blames Petrus's people for the conflict.
David's prejudice already blinds him to facts. He now completely shuts his eyes to the world,
immersing himself in his imaginary Teresa Guiccioli and the momentous artistic task he has set
himself. To do this great work, he constructs a nest of trash behind the veterinary clinic and takes up
residence there. Rosalind's prediction has come true. David really is a sad old man, delusional and
racist, who pokes around in rubbish. Everything about this image of David suggests that he is the
rotten fruit, already fallen and soon to be gone, of the old South Africa.

Chapter 24 | Summary
Summary
David Lurie sits behind the clinic writing and plunking out the story of a worn-out Teresa Guiccioli
begging for Lord Byron's presence, "embracing the darkness, embracing what it will bring." The
opera has become an obsession with him, but he has abandoned Byron's story totally. All he writes
are the moans of Teresa. It is "the kind of work a sleepwalker might write." He thinks of his
disappointed legacy.
David has taken to one dog, who will soon be euthanized, and formed a sort of "generous affection"
for him. He believes that "the dog would die for him." He thinks about writing a dog into the story to
join in Teresa's "lament."

On Saturdays, David helps his daughter, Lucy, at her stall at the market. One Saturday, they speak
about the pregnancy. She tells him she is "determined to be a good mother ... and a good person" and
that David should try the same. He says he is too old for that but privately thinks it's "not a bad
resolution to make, in dark times."
Although he does not go to Lucy's house, one day he walks up to the farm and sees Lucy working in
the flowers. He watches her, thinking she "is becoming a peasant." He considers his line going forth
into the future, and his ultimate erasure. He wonders about being a grandfather. There is a moment
of peace or stillness "which he would wish prolonged for ever," like a painting. At last, he makes his
presence known, and she invites him to tea. It is "a new start," and he is treated like a visitor.

On Sunday, as they euthanize the animals, the narrator reveals that David has learned to give the
dogs love in their final moments. The last animal of the day to be put down is the dog that David has
bonded with. He has considered keeping the dog for a while, but knows that it will have to die, and
so he goes to get him. The dog greets him affectionately, and David carries him in to be euthanized.

Analysis
In this final chapter, the verdict on David Lurie is settled, with the reader in the position of "the
universe and its all-seeing eye," the phrase David uses to wonder about his final judgment. He
realizes that he is not going to leave behind anything of artistic value. His opera is nothing more than
the continuous undifferentiated wail of Teresa. Just like all David's obsessions, the opera is
compelling to him. However, he knows it will not interest anyone else. It only interests him because
it is about him, as Teresa's wail is actually his own.
David's visit to Lucy's farm is rewarded with a Wordsworthian vision of his daughter in a state of
grace. She is frozen in time, about to give birth, in a field of flowers in peak bloom. The feeling of this
living picture is one David wants to live in forever. Much like the Teresa of his opera, frozen in her
howl and longing, he is yearning for an imaginary ideal of romance fixed in the past.

David has repeatedly said that he is too old to change. He still can't love his daughter or any woman
or himself or his neighbor. He can only offer a few moments of love to a dog. He has found the place
where he can be helpful and safely express love: the moment before the dog's death.

David has found his place at last, in this room that is a threshold between life and death, the real and
the abstract, grace and disgrace. His work is upholding the dignity of dogs, those lowest of creatures
in society's view. His work is both profoundly meaningful and absurdly meaningless. It is visceral
and ideal. David Lurie, the disgraced old man who pokes around in trash, has finally achieved a state
of equilibrium that balances the abstract with the real.

Themes
Disgrace
The word disgrace is best understood through its opposite, grace, of which there are various kinds.
Spiritual or religious grace is a state of being in God's favor. An aesthetic or experiential form of
grace is a state characterized by beauty and ease. Lastly, there is the social form of grace, where
disgrace signifies being condemned or ousted from the group.
David Lurie's disgrace exists in opposition to all these states. His self-imposed exile causes him to
undergo a profound transformation of lifestyle and a gentle shifting of temperament. From being a
cynical, bristly, city-dwelling, academic womanizer with poetic delusions, David becomes a nearly
homeless, banjo-picking, loving gatekeeper to the underworld for the infirm dogs of the Eastern
Cape.
David's ex-wife is the first to apply the term to him when she calls the situation with Melanie Isaacs
"disgraceful." This comment appears right before David reads the article in the Argus about his
harassment charge and thinks of himself in the third person as a "disgraced disciple of William
Wordsworth."
Wordsworth often dealt with the topic of grace in his writing. For Wordsworth, grace signified a
state of blessedness with both artistic and spiritual aspects, something David doesn't have. Instead
David feels he has even disappointed the poet he considers his master.
In Chapter 13, a singsong chant plays in David's head: "Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy's
secret; his disgrace." David's academic disgrace was not enough to demoralize him. However, Lucy's
rape puts him into a state of shock that is worsened by his inability to aid Lucy during the attack.
Although his disgrace (raping Melanie) and Lucy's secret (her rape) are closely related, David does
not seem to realize that his rape of Melanie is similar to Lucy's ordeal.
Shortly thereafter, David interprets Lucy's apathy about going to the farmers market as evidence
that "she would rather hide her face ... Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame." However,
Lucy never once expresses shame. She does not seem to feel disgraced by the rape. In fact, she
handles it and the resulting pregnancy and transfer of her land to Petrus with what can only be
called grace. Disgrace belongs to those who violate, not those who are violated.
David confesses his disgrace to Bev Shaw in the middle of an exchange about euthanizing dogs. After
telling her, David questions whether she would want to employ him now that she knows of his
disgrace. He now knows his actions were wrong.

David's journey back to grace comes through his work with the dogs undergoing euthanasia at the
clinic. Their loss of power in death is a disgrace, David thinks. But humans suffer the same loss of
power in death. By honoring the dignity of these dogs, David is atoning for the actions that put him
into a state of disgrace.

The Problem of Sex

The novel opens by declaring that David Lurie has "to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather
well." It turns out that he has not actually solved the problem, because sex is so complicated. By its
very nature, it involves the crossing of boundaries and the blurring of bodies, and the complications
related to sex can both create and destroy lives. The plot of the novel is driven by David's attempts to
find relief for his sexual desire, which his daughter Lucy agrees with him is "a burden we could well
do without."
David's initial solution to the problem of sex is to buy it. The first chapter describes the satisfaction
he derives from his relationship with the prostitute Soraya. However, after a year of sleeping with
her weekly, a boundary is crossed when by chance he sees her in town with her sons. Soraya's
professionalism and her desire to protect her family means there can be no overlap between the
two, so she cuts David off as a client. This leaves David with the problem of his unfulfilled sexual
desire.

Since he can no longer use money to buy sex, David's second attempt involves using his power and
authority to simply "take" sex from a woman weaker than him. David's power over Melanie Isaacs
has several aspects. He is white man, while she is a woman and a person of color. He is middle-aged
and experienced; she is basically an adolescent and unsure of herself. He is the professor, and she is
his student. He is bigger and stronger; she is slight of stature. David uses all these advantages to
engineer his affair with Melanie. It's not hard for David to rationalize taking what he wants, but he
fails to anticipate the consequences. Melanie becomes emotionally traumatized and drops out of
school. David loses his job and his reputation. Later, David tells Melanie's father, "I am sunk into a
state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself."

Still, the problem of sex remains, and David struggles to figure out a solution that does not involve
castration or death. He comes to believe his persistent desire is a problem—one related to the
reproductive drive that persists even after a man (or woman, in Bev Shaw's case) ceases to be
desirable. He decides Lucy's rapists were not motivated by pleasure or even vengeance, but by the
"testicles, sacs bulging with seed aching to perfect itself."

When David at last sleeps with a prostitute again, he marvels at how easily the persistent need is
satisfied with that small transaction. It is possible David is back where he started and the whole
cycle of desire and suffering will repeat itself. But an alternate view offered by the author is that his
life has unfolded in ways that will be more compelling than satisfying his sexual needs. He has his
soon-to-be-born grandson, his discovery of a personally satisfying form of art, and his love for the
dogs on the brink of death by euthanasia. Perhaps, the novel suggests, these will be enough.

History's Debts and the New South Africa

Disgrace shows that after centuries of racism and violence, achieving healing, unity, and progress is
not easy or simple. In fact, it demands sacrifices. Coetzee portrays a dark, pastoral, tragicomic vision
of postapartheid South Africa where some aspects of the old power structure have been successfully
reversed. However, subjugation, violence, and injustice continue to define lives. As David Lurie notes
while contemplating his daughter Lucy's homestead, "The more things change the more they remain
the same." For David, Lucy's position signifies "history repeating itself, though in a more modest
vein." The question is whether "history has learned a lesson."
The text suggests that history has not yet learned a lesson but may be in the process of doing so. As
Farodia Rassool, David's colleague at the university, notes during his hearing, David's response to
the committee's questioning about his sexual relationship with Melanie Isaacs makes "no mention of
the long history of exploitation of which this is part." While the apartheid laws forbidding interracial
sexual relations and marriage have been repealed, the long tradition of white males exploiting
females of color continues. David Lurie's rape of Melanie Isaacs is part of this tradition. In the New
South Africa, those who were at the very bottom during apartheid—namely, women and animals—
remain at the bottom, to be exploited, used, and abused.

In the novel there are clearly debts remaining from the country's history that must be paid. Coetzee's
portrayal of the investigation into David Lurie's relationship with Melanie Isaacs functions as a
criticism of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, which took place from 1995–
2002. During these hearings, those who had committed crimes and abuses of human rights during
apartheid were promised amnesty for their crimes in exchange for confessing the truth of what
happened.

Similarly, in Disgrace, the university promises David that in exchange for a contrite confession of
what passed between him and Melanie, he can keep his job. If he does so, he will avoid any
consequences for his actions while making public a story of private pain. David refuses this deal,
quits his job, and struggles to resolve his guilt and state of disgrace on his own. As Melanie's father
tells David after he apologizes, "The question is not, are we sorry? ... The question is, what are we
going to do now that we are sorry?" The consequences David experiences are severe. However,
through them, David acquires a sense of morality and the ability to serve others. Coetzee thus
suggests that reconciliation demands justice, which in turn requires payment and real change, not
merely confession and apology.
Lucy's response to her rape by three black men sheds further light on the idea that justice demands
payment. Lucy is personally innocent, but she is aware she is caught in a specific and crucial
historical moment. She accepts with grace that history and politics have brought trauma and seismic
change into her personal life. When Lucy tells David she was "stunned" by the "personal hatred" with
which the unknown men violated her, David responds that "it was history speaking through them ...
a history of wrong" that "came down from the ancestors" into her life.

Lucy wants to live in peace with her black neighbors. She accepts that the way forward requires
some who are innocent to suffer and yet be willing to forgive. Because of this, Lucy does not report
the rape. As she tells David, "In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter.
But in this place, at this time, it is not." She explains her rationale to her outraged father: "They see
me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors." She accepts that she
is, in part, paying for the wrongs of the past, asking rhetorically, "Why should I be allowed to live
here without paying?"

More than any other character in the novel, Lucy is emblematic of the way forward to a South Africa
that is truly new. She intends to carry to term the pregnancy that results from the rape. As well, she
declares her desire to "to be a good mother and a good person." Those who have been divided from
one another in racial hatred must now learn how to live together peacefully. David's spiritual vision
of Lucy symbolizes this future. He sees his pregnant daughter among blooming flowers with Petrus's
new house in the background. Something beautiful can be born from the pain and violation of the
past. This will happen only if the country, particularly the white population, can act with the grace,
humility, and adaptability that Lucy displays.